Ocean's Eleven, Directed by Lewis Milestone, 1960

"One for all – and all for KICKS!" The original Rat Pack movie: Frank, Dino, Sammy, Joey and their finger-poppin', all-drinking, all-smoking coconspirators are present and politically incorrect, alongside a Dames' auxiliary comprised, swooningly, of Shirley MacLaine and Angie Dickinson. Eleven former paratroopers assemble to rob five Vegas casinos in a single night, carrying the loot away in garbage trucks. The cast filmed all day and schticked it up onstage at the Sands hotel nightly, so the movie has a tired, hungover feel to it, but the vanished Vegas of 1960 – the old Sahara and Riviera Hotels, and Bugsy Siegel's own Flamingo – shines forever on celluloid. And the 2001 Soderbergh remake is a hundred times more fun.•Sahara, Riviera, Desert Inn, Sands and The Flamingo casinos

Viva Las Vegas, George Sidney, 1964

Once upon a time the God of Vegas was its visionary mobster-founder Bugsy Siegel, but by the time Elvis Presley died in 1977, he – more specifically, "Fat Elvis" – had displaced Siegel as the official deity of post-Sinatra Sin City. Not only does he sing Las Vegas's anthem in this movie, for the final years of his career Elvis made Vegas his second home. In this weightless slice of gossamer and cheese, he's in town to race the city's first grand prix, but is waylaid by Ann-Margret in her Bye Bye Birdie prime. Camp and dated as hell, but so very, very Vegas! The Little Church of The West, the Strip's oldest building, features in the final scene.•The Little Church of the West

Diamonds Are Forever, Guy Hamilton, 1971

Most of the casino interiors were shot at Pinewood studios, but Hamilton got in some fine on location shooting too . The Las Vegas International Hotel stands in for "The Whyte House", headquarters of Willard Whyte, a Howard Hughes-style reclusive millionaire sought by James Bond. Oddly, Howard Hughes himself, then at the height of his notoriety, and probably the most famous citizen of Las Vegas, partly helped get the movie made. He persuaded city officials to close down the Strip for the Mustang car chase, and opening up his hotels and casinos to the crew. Third-rate Bond, first-rate '71 Vegas.•Circus Circus, Tropicana, Las Vegas Hilton (then the Las Vegas International Hotel)

Bugsy, Barry Levinson, 1991

Parts of Bugsy were shot in Las Vegas, but I can't tell you which or where, perhaps because in a metropolis dedicated to the obliteration of time, memory and guilt, any place where mobster Bugsy Siegel originally went about building his dream city has since been paved over multiple times. Not that it matters; if you sit in the garden of the current, gigantic Flamingo Hotel, you are essentially on the site of its smaller predecessor, built by Siegel in 1946 to exploit Nevada's opportunities in legalised gambling, and whose last original parts were pulled down in the redevelopment orgy of the mid-1990s. One wonders if Siegel would approve of what became of his vision. Was he ever that tacky?• Flamingo Hotel

Casino, Martin Scorsese, 1995

Shot mainly at the louche Riviera, Casino is the anti-Bugsy: the Paradise Lost to Bugsy's Creation Myth. A gambler, a mobster and a hooker are given Las Vegas on a plate – a gangster's paradise: "It's a morality carwash for wiseguys" – and proceed to throw it all away in an orgy of cocaine and homicide. Scorsese fetishises the look and feel of the corrupt and decadent Vegas of the 1970s and his most poignant shot is of the old casinos being dynamited and replaced by Disney-style toy castles teeming with America's baroque peasantry. Vegas has always been garish, so imagine how Vegas and the 1970s collided – and see it here: livid, sparkling, nauseating, beautiful.•Le Bistro Lounge at the Riviera Hotel and Casino

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Terry Gilliam 1998

Hunter S Thompson's savagely toxic portrait of Vegas, and its explosive illustrations by Ralph Steadman, dovetail beautifully with the madness-as-method approach of director Terry Gilliam and a full-tilt HST impersonation by Johnny Depp. Thompson is nimbly adapted, but Vegas takes a psychedelic pasting, filled as it is with hallucinatory grotesques and rightwing bogey figures, mindless gamblers and idiot middle-American thrillseekers and squares. You either love Vegas or you hate Vegas: this movie hates it. Favourite trivia: the rear-screen projection footage in the exterior driving scenes is culled from the 1978-1981 hit TV show Vega$•Stardust Casino, Le Bistro Lounge at the Riviera Hotel and Casino

Showgirls, Paul Verhoeven, 1995

A procession of moronic gargoyles and grotesques (yes, here even the beautiful are ugly) contend for dubious accolades in the hotly contested field of "power-stripping," using sex, drugs, violence and, most of all, each other in their struggle to become Sin City's premier bump'n'grinder. Over the top and deeply jaundiced, Paul Verhoeven's drama excoriates the trashiness of contemporary American aspirations, and the Vegas setting: boiling neon, stripclub-lighting, few exteriors, is vital to the director's contemptuous vision of a greedy, heedless nation gone to hell. He seems to be saying to the audience: "Here is the stinking garbage of your dreams – eat it up!"•Riviera Hotel and Casino, Cheetah's Topless Club, 2112 Western Avenue, Versace, the Forum Shops, Caesars Palace

Leaving Las Vegas, Mike Figgis, 1995

Wander out of any casino on the Strip and soon enough you'll spot the benighted and broken of Las Vegas, a city where many things – dreams, fortunes, people – come simply to die. Minatory hookers, mad junkies, flat-busted gamblers, beggars … all of them come out at night. Leaving Las Vegas takes a Vegas transient (Nicolas Cage, in town to drink himself to death) and a Vegas lifer (prostitute Elisabeth Shue) and watches them in a steadily widening gyre through alcoholism, rape and total immiseration in the Seven Circles of Vegas Hell. The Nevada Tourist Authority probably hates this movie, but it gets at the Vegas all the other Vegas movies miss. •Bally's Casino Resort, Circus Circus, Flamingo Hotel, Excalibur Hotel and Casino, all on Las Vegas Boulevard South

The Hangover, Todd Phillips, 2009

Welcome to the Vegas of now: gigantic, zillion-room hotels, hookers on tap, booze and narcotics likewise, gambling submerged by family attractions (Blue Man Group and Cirque du Soleil have long since displaced The Chairman of the Board (Sinatra) and The King), and the city's official ad campaign, which emphasises, nudge-nudge, that "what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas". This quartet of bachelors wallow in the direst possibilities available to young men of money and means in the Jewel of the Desert: tigers in the bathroom, missing Holocaust rings, a vanishing groom and an insanely volatile Korean gangster. This movie is now the blueprint for a top-notch Vegas bad-boy weekend. The city's motto should be: "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."•Bellagio Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas Boulevard South

Swingers, Doug Liman, 1996

"Vegas, baby!" Although Swingers is technically an LA movie (number 14 on the Los Angeles Times's 25 Best Movies About LA list in 2008), it also features a memorable spur-of-the-moment midnight detour to Vegas, where budding actors and Rat Pack-revivalists Mike and Trent (Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn, when they were still skinny) imbibe deeply the wayward retro-essence of Frank and Dino. Trent scores, Mike flames out, and it's back to LA with his tail between his legs. For a moment, however, it seems possible that some special magic conferred upon him simply by being in Vegas may transmit to hangdog Mike the requisite degree of "money-ness" to score like a Rat Packer. It doesn't.•Stardust Hotel and Casino, Paradise Buffet at Fremont Hotel and Casino